


Nameless

by rachel2205



Category: the snow child (eowyn ivey)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:46:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachel2205/pseuds/rachel2205
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Faina thinks about motherhood, and naming, and belonging - and makes a decision.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nameless

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jouissant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/gifts).



> Seasons greetings, jouissant! I hope you enjoy this little piece. While it isn't exactly answering any of your prompts, I thought that you might enjoy seeing some of the novel from Faina's perspective. After all, she is the focus of everyone's attention in the book, but we never get to hear her thoughts. So much of Faina's fate is left as a mystery, but I liked to think that she had made her own choice.
> 
> There are a few short pieces of dialogue here that are lifted from the novel, to help anchor it within the canon.

“You can go outdoors for a bit. I’ll stay with him.” 

The sunlight today was thin but fierce, needle-bright against the snow. The sky was the aching blue that Faina had tried to remember as she’d screamed and grunted in her labour bed. She put her fingertips against the window; although the cabin was warm, the glass was still cool as first-frost. 

I could go, Faina thought. I could. She dressed as quickly as she could, lacing her moccasins and buttoning her coat. Her fingers still felt so slow, and her heart was beating hard. Mabel had soothed the baby now with little hushing coos, but if Faina delayed too long he might scream again. She could feel the weight of milk in her breasts, and knew that if he cried they would start streaming, and she would take him in her arms and forget again, for a little while, to want the woods or the great blue sky. 

At the door Faina looked back. Mabel jounced the baby in her arms and Faina felt a tug at her heart like a fish hook catching. She had felt it before, remembering the hot night when Garrett said: “I thought you wanted to be here, with me, in our home.” She had kissed him, fierce and long, feeling a barb twist in her heart – a strangely tender sort of pain. That night she had stayed, but today she set her jaw and turned, open the door, and walked out into the snow. She could feel the cold of it through her moccasins, and her whole body shivered with pleased recognition. This. Yes. 

She walked as far as the tree line. It took a long time; her whole body ached, dull pain in her pelvis splintering into something sharp along her spine and down her thighs. By the time she reached the spruces even her hands were throbbing. For a long while she stood and looked at the trees. The forest would heal her, she was sure of that. She could slip between these trees and not come back. She could live as she had always done, and the ache in her womb and hips would subside and her milk would dry up, and here in the safety of the wild she would be Faina again. 

It took a lot longer to walk back than it had done to walk out, even following the trail she had carved into the deep snow. Her body was heavy with misery, leaden disappointment slowing her feet. But when, back in the cabin, she took off her coat and Mabel passed Faina her son, her heart spasmed hard with a joy sharp and bright as sunlight on midwinter snow. Faina looked down into his face, blotchy with tears, at his little fingers curling into the collar of her shift, and knew that the ache she felt for Garrett was nothing in comparison to this. 

“Have you named him yet?” asked Mabel later, as dark settled in around the cabin. Faina didn’t answer. She rocked the cradle with her foot, a steady clack-clack. The baby slept better when he was by the warmth of the woodstove. He was so like Garrett, this little thing that had grown inside her body. 

“You must give him a name, child. It can’t be like with the dog,” Mabel insisted, and Faina still said nothing. She thought of the puppy Garrett had brought her, and how once, months later, he’d asked her why she didn’t name the dog. 

“If I name him, I’m saying he belongs to me, and he’s not mine to own,” she explained, as they lay naked in the soft grass by a stream.

“My parents named me,” Garrett said, forehead creasing. “They don’t _own_ me.” 

“Not like a bowl or a coat, no,” said Faina, laughing, “but you belong to them.” The dog didn’t belong to her, any more than her fox had. They were companions, not pets.

“I belong to _you_ ,” replied Garrett, and rolled her underneath him, both of them laughing-sighing-gasping, arms and legs tangled. Later, as Garrett slept with his head on her breast, Faina stroked his hair and wondered if it were true, if he belonged to her. It made her tremble with an anxious sort of wanting, a feeling that made her want to either get up and run or to wake him with bruising kisses. She did neither, and instead lay quiet, fingers in his hair. If he’s mine I’ll have to take care of him, she thought. If he belongs to me.

Now, nine months later, Faina looked down into the cradle, at the son who looked so much like his father, and knew she had been wrong. If you named something it didn’t belong to you; you belonged to it. So much of her already belonged to the baby. At his every movement her body tensed, waiting to see what he needed. Two weeks after his birth, she still bled from between her legs, messy remnants of the making of him, of the blood that had kept him nourished. Her whole body ached to feed him, not just her breasts, though those kept leaking milk through the shifts Mabel made her. When I first loved Garrett, Faina thought , we made love under trees, by water, in high grass. When we named love, we had to move indoors, under this low roof, these stifling walls. That was called _being married_. Giving a name to things fixed them in place, Faina realised: and suddenly she could hardly breathe, had to get up from the chair and go to the door, open it wide. But it was night time, and dark, and the baby cried as the cold wind came in. So Faina shut the door and went back to the cradle, where the steady rock-rock of her foot on the runner sent her son back to sleep. 

She had a week, then, of restless sleep; each night she’d dream about the baby, and nearly always someone would insist that she name him. Sometimes it was Jack, sometimes Garrett, sometimes Mabel who asked, but each time Faina would open her mouth to answer – and then wake up sitting bolt upright, heart beating in panic. She could lie down again next to her sleeping husband only when she remembered that she had not, after all, given her son a name. 

On the seventh night the dream was stranger. She’d been tired all day, nearly dozing in her chair whenever she sat down, and yet between those spells of tiredness she’d been filled with an agitated energy that sent her in and out of the front door, feet bare on the snow. Garrett kept catching her and bringing her back in, but it was so warm in the cabin that she felt sick. Her bones ached hot and heavy, and her skin felt kindling-dry, like it might burst into flames at the slightest touch. She fell asleep after feeding the baby, and dreamed of her wedding day. She saw her Garrett riding towards her, so handsome on his horse, and laughed at the sight of the husky wreathed in flowers. Garrett took the wedding ring out of the pouch around the dog’s neck, but this time when he pushed it onto her finger it burned.

“It hurts, Garrett,” she cried out, tears in her eyes, as the ring sizzled. When she looked down at her skin she saw it was steaming, not burning. She reached out for Garrett, but her fingertips dissolved into drops of water that splashed his frightened face. 

When Faina woke up, Mabel was beside her, and she felt a relief so profound it was close to pain.

“Mabel? You are here?” She clutched at her foster mother’s wrist with fingers she half-feared would turn to steam. “What is happening to me?” Mabel soothed her, told her that she was ill but that she could get better, and brought her glass after glass of water. But it wasn’t until Garrett went outside for a basin of snow and Mabel pressed a lump of it to her lips that Faina felt some relief from the pain in her bones. I have to go outside, she thought feverishly, I can’t melt out there in the snow.

They insisted on wrapping her up when they went outside, many more layers than Faina needed, but even so for the first time in weeks Faina felt as if she could breathe properly, some tight knot in her chest unlocking so that her lungs could open wide. 

“Do you want me to stay?” asked Garrett, once Faina was settled in her snowy bed. She looked up at his sweet face. I do love you, she thought, and felt that tender barb of pain in her chest again. But this time she didn’t let it draw her in.

“No. Go inside. Hold our son.” Her voice was very gentle, but Garrett obeyed it at once. Faina tried to watch him go, but Mabel was at her side, busily tucking her in, and Faina had the sudden sense that she would never see him again. She felt a crack deep inside her, like river ice rotting and breaking into pieces come spring, and she knew what she had to do.

“Are you well, child?” said Mabel, looking closely at her face.

“Oh, yes. Out here, with the trees and snow, I can breathe again.”

It didn’t take long for Mabel to fall asleep, even in this bitter cold. Sore as she was, Faina could still move quietly, and with each layer that she shed the pain in her bones receded a little. She lay each piece of clothing carefully down on the bed, nightgown inside the coat. Perhaps they’ll think I melted, she thought dizzily, remembering her dream. She crept quietly away, bare feet sure in the snow, until she reached the tree line. Already she felt stronger, and with each step closer to the forest she became more and more herself, the Faina who belonged _here_ , by herself.

I shouldn’t look back, thought Faina, knowing she might lose her nerve. But she couldn’t help it, turning one last time to look at the cabin. A little orange glow winked in one window, where Garrett would have a lamp lit as he soothed the baby. Faina’s body trembled all through, and for the first time in her life she felt cold. I want to bring him with me, she thought, and imagined for a moment going back to the cabin and taking the baby out of Garrett’s arms, bringing him into the woods with her… Hope flared up in her, but then she thought: he is too like his father, and would get cold. Inside her there was another ice-crack as a piece of her fell away. 

Mabel will look after him, she thought. Mabel will look after both of them, but most of all the baby. Before he was born, she’d asked Mabel to be his mother. Mabel had said no, then, but she wouldn’t now. She would look after the boy better than Faina could. She and Jack and Garrett would raise him, and they would give him a name. Perhaps it would be safe to come back, then. When he belonged to someone else. 

Faina took a breath and nodded, and then turning her back on the cabin, sprang into the woods.


End file.
